Much has been written, and debated, about the bewildering news that 17 teenage girls from Gloucester, Massachusetts evidently made a pact to get pregnant.

This is a tragedy. But, as this post over at Beliefnet reminds us, it may also be a barometer:

Whether this was, as some have speculated, a desperate attempt to find unconditional love in a place where that’s not so readily available, or whether it was an act of rebellion gone awry, or whether there will prove to be other reasons and explanations forthcoming, there are some things we already know.

When we treat teenagers as though they are animals who can’t be expected to control their hormonal urges, they will not try.

When we turn a blind eye to the emptiness and spiritual rot our culture offers to the young, those things will overwhelm them.

When we act as though it’s perfectly normal for a girl of seventeen–or younger–to read a magazine with that name which gives her sex tips and advice on how to get her boyfriend to wear a condom and what to do if she has a “pregnancy scare,” then we really shouldn’t be surprised if the girls we raise that way decide they’ll reach for the transcendent values of motherhood–even unwed motherhood–as a substitute for the banal and meaningless life of hookups and loveless physical intimacy they have so far known, and which has, unaccountably, failed to be the zenith of human experience that every Pill-pushing pediatrician and condom-minded classroom sex-ed session has made it out to be.

My heart breaks for these girls. They were handed scorpions when they wanted bread; they understand that there is some connection between love and babies, but think that the baby should be the one they love first; sex isn’t about love, not really, not in their world. It’s just a means to an end, and it doesn’t matter whether that end is physical pleasure or surreptitious procreation, so long as nobody has any illusions about it all.

Is this really what we want for our children?

I think we can all agree: in a word, no.